Smart update copying all files each time

[fabius]

I have two external firewire drives - one contains mp3s, the other has a number of partitions, each used for backing up various drives.

Since I upgraded to Tiger it seems like SuperDuper! is copying all files from one disk to another when I do a Backup. eg, a few days ago I did a backup of the MP3 drive to its backup copy - all files were copied (it took nearly two hours). I assumed maybe this was something to do with my recent Tiger install, and that it would be OK next time.

But I just did another backup, and again it seems to copy all files - 1h 45m. So I've just tried again, not long after it finished, and it's started to copy everything once more - ten minutes in and it hasn't got far through the files.

Maybe I've done something silly to cause this, but I can't think what... Any help appreciated, thanks.

[dnanian]

Hm. It sounds like the MP3's are all 'floating', which might cause them to be copied more than once.

There's a way to fix this, if you're comfortable with the Terminal... are you?

[fabius]

Yup, fire away!

[dnanian]

OK. You need to figure out your default group and short uid (use "whoami" and "groups"). Once done, use the following command on the MP3 volume, after ensuring Ownership is on:

sudo chown -R short-user-name:group /Volumes/the-mp3-volume/*

Once done, use SD! two times, and the 2nd time it shouldn't copy so much.

[jbyronr]

I have the same issue for an external firewire drive that only contains my iTunes music library. When I use SD! to smart update that drive to another external drive, it copies all the files each time (~2hours). Smart updates of my internal hard drive work as expected.

In terminal, the owner, group, and permissions seem to be set identically for files in my ~ folder as they are for the files on my iTunes drive. The group is listed as the same name as my username. Should I chown/chgrp the group to be 'admin' instead? (my primary user account is a member of the admin group)

[dnanian]

No, that shouldn't be necessary. If you use the following to look at some of the files that you think get copied every time:

sudo ls -l "a folder you're suspicious of"

Do you get a different value for the user and group than you do without the sudo?

[fabius]

Originally Posted by dnanian

OK. You need to figure out your default group and short uid (use "whoami" and "groups"). Once done, use the following command on the MP3 volume, after ensuring Ownership is on:

sudo chown -R short-user-name:group /Volumes/the-mp3-volume/*

Once done, use SD! two times, and the 2nd time it shouldn't copy so much.

Hmm, that doesn't seem to have worked - I did as you suggest and the second time it's still copying every file.

I don't understand what "ensuring Ownership is on" means though - maybe that's the missing ingredient?

[dnanian]

Ensuring ownership is on means that you need to do a "Get Info" on the drive, and ensure that "Ignore ownership on this volume" is NOT checked.

I'm not sure, at present, why it would be copying these files every time. Could you please provide me with an "ls -l" of one of the files on the source and destination volumes, running the ls -l with and without sudo? In other words, if there's a file in the root that's being copied called "foo.mp3", you'd do:

ls -l /foo.mp3
sudo ls -l /foo.mp3

and, on the backup:

ls -l /Volumes/my-backup-volume/foo.mp3
sudo -s -l /Volumes/my-backup/volume/foo.mp3

Thanks.